1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic mail (email). More specifically, the present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for displaying message genealogy in the language of the user interface of an email recipient using a normalized set of subject prefix codes.
2. Background Art
Currently, it is common for email based messaging systems to add a prefix to the subject of a communication to indicate the recent genealogy of the message. For example, when replying to a message with the subject “ABC,” a new subject “Re: ABC” is generated to indicate to the email recipient that this is a reply to an email titled “ABC.” Another common prefix indicates a forwarded message as in “Fw: ABC.”
There are several problems associated with current email prefix methodologies including, for example, the accumulation of prefixes and the use of prefixes in natural languages other than those with which the recipient is familiar. Both of these problems can in turn cause noise in the subject line, prevent the subject line from being understood by the recipient, and prevent messages from being easily sorted by subject.
When email is repeatedly exchanged between multiple parties, the prefixes naturally start to duplicate and can become a nuisance. For example, after a plurality of exchanges, an email with the subject “ABC” may appear as “Re: Re: Fw: Re: ABC” in the subject line. One existing solution to this problem, provided by Microsoft Outlook Express, is to strip off any existing prefixes up to and including the first colon that appears in the first 5 characters of the subject. This solution, however, is inadequate under two conditions. The first condition occurs when one of the parties exchanging email is using a non-compliant email program that is not configured to strip off existing prefixes. In this case, the prefixes are not stripped off in the desired manner. The second condition is encountered when one of the email programs does not use a colon at the end of a prefix. This sometimes happens with email clients that have been translated into languages other than English, thus making a colon inappropriate. This also causes the stripping method to fail.
A second known solution for removing existing prefixes is to remove prefixes that are known to the email client software. However, this is usually limited to the prefixes for the same language version only, because it is difficult to maintain tables of all the translations and almost impossible to maintain tables of all the translations for all other email products. For example, an email exchange between English and German participants may look like this: “Re: Ant: Re: Ant: Fw: ABC.” To this extent, the prefix “Re:” would not be recognized by the German version of the email program because the German version would be looking for the prefix “Ant:.”
Another existing problem is that it is currently very simple to introduce an incorrect subject prefix (e.g., “Re:”) into the subject line of an email in an attempt to fool the recipient into thinking that the email is a reply to a previous email. This is commonly done in unsolicited “spam” emails to make the recipient believe that the email is the result of an earlier email discussion, thereby increasing the likelihood that the recipient will open and possibly read the message.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer program product for displaying message genealogy in the language of the user interface of an email recipient using a normalized set of subject prefix codes.